Herrick is _par excellence_ the poet of flowers and fruits. Cherries, cowslips, daffodils, and primroses are inseparably connected with his verse. That the rich luxuriance of Dean Prior must have been a source of continual pleasure to him we cannot doubt. Yet even in this department of nature one misses local touches. Where are the high hedgerows, the ferns, and the fox-gloves? and where are the apple orchards of Devon? Herrick was very fond of observing village festivities and studying folk-lore, and it is generally assumed that the poems which deal with these subjects were written in Devonshire and based on Devonshire observations. This may be so, though I do not know of any evidence in favour of it. On the other hand there is one small circumstance which seems to me significant. In Herrick’s descriptions of barley-breaks, harvest homes, and Christmas festivities, there is much mention of beer but none of cider. Cider making had its poetry for Keats:— Or by a cider-press with patient look Thou watchest the last oozings hour by hour. It seems strange that it should never be mentioned by the poet of cider-land. One of Herrick’s parishioners stands out pleasantly in the pages of _Hesperides_—“my Prue,” otherwise Prudence Baldwin, the house-keeper, who apparently followed him to London at his ejection and returned with him in 1662. It is generally assumed that the persons attacked in the epigrams were parishioners. If so, no wonder they were churlish. It does not appear that many of the fifty or sixty persons addressed in what Mr. Grosart calls “verse-celebrations,” were West-Country people, and on the whole there is as little of local life as of local scenery in the _Hesperides_. The critics, then, seem to me perverse, who, in spite of Herrick’s assurances, declare that he only pretended to dislike Dean Prior. They rely, presumably, on his keen eye for country beauties. Now I venture to doubt whether Herrick, as we see him in the _Hesperides_, is one of the real nature-poets. He knows and loves certain aspects of nature, more particularly fruits and flowers, bright colours and sweet smells. Even amongst these he is often happiest when he can trace some likeness to human beauty. The famous “Cherries ripe” grew on Julia’s lips, not in an orchard. Above all poets he understands the picturesqueness of dress, and when after a catalogue of Julia’s silks and laces in their “wild civility” he confesses that he dotes less on nature than on art, he probably speaks the truth. It is the same with country life; he has none of the deep respect for the peasant’s healthy and thrifty life, which lies at the bottom of Virgil and Horace and Wordsworth’s work. He has plenty of interest in their May-days and other merry-making, but little, I think, in their life as a whole. And the few praises of country life to be found in the _Hesperides_ do not seem to me to ring very true.